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an automatic weapon from beyond him and I was forced back into cover. My friend and 2i/c had come out of his room before me and received a rifle butt in his face before he could reach his weapon. He was taken with Gemayel, and had never been found. At our debrief all the facility personnel signed extra secrecy clauses and the event was sealed up tighter than radioactive waste.
    End of story, Colonel, I want to say. Don’t drag me back there now. Because this wasn’t the kind of conflict I signed up for in any case. Not for the frenzied slaughter by American jets of the retreating Iraqis at the Mutla Gap, not for the fuel-air bombs that sucked the lungs and eyes out of their victims, or the conscripts bulldozed alive into their trenches, or the depleted uranium that’s poisoned the desert for a thousand years, and not for the disappearance of my best friend. Don’t drag me back to that.
    ‘I have to tell you,’ the colonel continues, ‘there are those who think you might have got just a bit too friendly with your prisoner. They think you might have struck a deal with him. Did you strike a deal with him, Taverner?’
    It’s an abhorrent suggestion, but it’s getting me where it hurts. It is so perversely twisted a suggestion that I’m wondering if an equally twisted deal has been struck in which I’m the scapegoat, and am filled with misery at this possibility. I can’t think about it now. But the colonel isn’t letting up.
    ‘What did you agree? Agree to defend him? Fight off his kidnappers? Kill a Jew or two? Or were you just going to ask them to go away back to Israel? Because if it’s found to be that, you’re looking at an increase in sentence for Racial Aggravation, Section 240. That is unless you’re charged with Unlawful Killing, Section 42, which carries up to a life sentence. Do you want to talk about it now, sort it out? Or do you want to play the hero and go to prison? You will go to prison. Do you want to go to prison?’
    ‘I can’t …’ Just breathe . ‘I can’t answer …’ Breathe . ‘That question. Sir.’
    My eyes are closed now. From another room comes the scraping sound of someone getting up from his chair. It’s the Face and he’s back to escort me to my place against the wall.
    ‘Nice chat with the colonel?’ I hear him ask. ‘Oh dear, was he a bit hard on you? Speaking strictly personally, it sounds to me like you’re fucked . Right, hats on, everybody.’
    And I’m back against the wall with the pillowcase over my head now, wondering if there really is an Israeli unit claiming its pound of flesh for the accidental death of one of its commandos. The colonel’s report will set the tone for everything that follows, and I’m not co-operating. But it’s too much effort now to think this through. My mind is grinding to a halt like a film that’s being slowed down, and it’s frame by frame now.
    ‘Shall we try a bit of white noise on him, Billy?’
    I shudder in anticipation, and not being able to see amplifies my fear.
    ‘Put it right by his ear and turn it on.’
    I hear their bodies drawing near and wonder how I’ll cope. Then I hear a strange sonorous whine by my ear and realise after a few seconds that it’s Billy, whistling a tuneless rendition of ‘Rule Britannia’.
    ‘That’s torture , that is,’ says the Face, and they both burst into heartless guffawing.
     
    I am falling asleep. My legs buckle several times, but Billy is always there to offer his own special encouragement. Twice I collapse, but he’s there to pick me up and remind me, in his own way, that I’m messing him around and he’s not fucking having any more of this shit from me. The pillowcase comes off again and I look up at him out of one eye. He towers over me and seems monstrously large. I doubt if I will take much more. My body does not co-operate any longer. Billy hauls me into the chair, and the colonel is waiting patiently for me. I no longer care whether he is really a colonel or not.